Downhill Battle is a great website with tons of interesting information, and they are also the people behind Grey Tuesday. I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but it’s all educational. Did you know label and Apple take 89 cents of every song sold on iTunes? Oh, and shhhh.
Category Archives: Music
Death of Flexible Width Designs
It’s over, it’s done. Those of you holding on should wave the white flag as two of the best flexible width sites, Doug Bowman and Dan Cederholm, have thrown in the towel and gone fixed-width without even an entry of explanation, I suppose because the benefits of fixed-width are so obvious no explanation is necessary. Update: Cedorholm’s design is now centered.
The assault is coming from all sides:
Dear Mr Antonioni:
I recently screened your classic film, The Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. I have a problem with the way you used screen space. My theater’s screen is big and wide. It is capable of handling many actors at the same time. For instance, crowd scenes and battle scenes work well. But in your movie there are only a few actors — and many times they are pictured in one corner of the screen or another, against a stark minimalist background. This is a terrible waste of screen space. For instance, there is one scene where Ms Vitti is filmed on the left side of the screen and there is a white forest behind her. The white forest is not much to look at. Sure, I can look to the left and watch Ms Vitti’s performance, but what do I see when I squint my eyes and look only at the right side of the screen? Not much! I urge you to add extra characters and situations to your movie so every inch of my screen bursts with action at all times.Sincerely,
Howard Gumpf
Ouch. Now I think the film/web analogy is a bad one, and it breaks down with any sort of critical thought. Zeldman knows this but he’s trying to make a point.
Was it that long ago that flexible-width designs were all the rage? They came in with a bang, and left with a whimper. Is anyone still holding out? Are there any good flexible sites left? The only place I see it anymore in web applications (such as the WordPress administration interface) and in lightly designed e-commerce sites like Amazon.
Style Updates
For better or worse, there have been a number of stylesheet updates around here, so you may notice things looking slightly different. First off are the shadows behind the main content box, for whose sake non-semantic elements were added to this page for the first time ever. How quick we are to sell out!
Speaking of selling out, text advertisements may appear at the top every now and then. Yes they suck but it’s the holidays and extra cash is always nice.
I moved the background image for the post titles from the anchor element to the h2 element to prevent the blinking when you rolled over the titles in IE on Windows. My Mother will be sorely disappointed as she thought that was a rather cool effect I had done intentionally. I wish!
Tantek and Eric informed me that my site was completely borked in respectively Mac IE 5 and Safari. This site is an experiment, so I make no guarantees as to browser compabilitiy but I try to be good about testing things on browsers available to me. Last night I used Greg’s Powerbook to see what was going on. It seems Safari was having trouble with some commented out content (the ads that are temporarily disabled) so I moved that from HTML comments to PHP comments. Commenting things out server-side is actually a much better practice because it keeps the source code maintainability for you the author but hides the comments from any visitors. There is also a savings in bandwidth, but in many cases that will be minimal. So as a best practice go from:
<-- Three extra divs added because prima the donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. -->
to:
<?php /* :-- Three extra divs added because the prima donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. And they'll never see this comment. MUHAHAHA! */ ?>
As for Mac IE, I wasn’t sure where to begin. It doesn’t handle the float on the menu list items well so instead of a nice tabby menu you have a series of giant honking bars in the header. I could go to display: inline for the navigation list items and work with the horizontal menu from there, but I’ve always prefered having the list items floated and the anchors as blocks, which you can’t do when the containing list element is inline. If I remember correctly Eric helped me around this problem before on the WordPress site (thank you!) by giving the items a fixed width, but I don’t have the space to burn here like I did on that menu.
Checking over my stats, Mac IE users make up approximately 2.1% of my viewing audience over the life of this site, and closer to 0.9% over the last month. Uowever is this low and declining number because other browsers are now in vogue on the Mac and IE hasn’t been updated recently to quench Mac users’ insatiable desire for upgrades? Or is it because my site looks so bad in their browser? The world may never know.
So the moral of the story is: the web is a jungle and watch your comments when on Safari.
Dotson Gig Tonight
Well the last gig got canned due to torrential rain, and now this Monday I’m feeling a bit under the weather. That’s life! Here are the details again, try to make it out if you can:
Tonight at 7:30 PM I’ll be performing with the Dennis Dotson big band on lead alto. Our entire program is going to be exclusively music from the highly talented composer and pianist Joe LoCascio, who will also be playing with us. It is the first night of what they’re calling JazzFest 2003 and there are more details, including directions and a map, at JazzHouston. They say they’re charging for tickets but I don’t think they have in the past so I’m not sure about that. I’ve been looking forward to this gig and I think it’s going to be great, so if you’d like to hear some exciting jazz tonight, try to check it out.
By the way, welcome to December. It’s by far my favorite month of the year and I’m going to savor every minute of it. December is the month I look forward to when trudging through all the other months. Lot’s of exciting things planned this month, from HPUG to WordPress to even something with the elusive Mike. And that’s just the volunteer stuff.
Update: Thanks to all who came out. Having people you love in the audience makes performing a whole difference experience. 🙂
Dennis Dotson Big Band Gig
Tonight at 7:30 PM I’ll be performing with the Dennis Dotson big band on lead alto. Our entire program is going to be exclusively music from the highly talented composer and pianist Joe LoCascio, who will also be playing with us. It is the first night of what they’re calling JazzFest 2003 and there are more details, including directions and a map, at JazzHouston. They say they’re charging for tickets but I don’t think they have in the past so I’m not sure about that. I’ve been looking forward to this gig and I think it’s going to be great, so if you’d like to hear some exciting jazz tonight, try to check it out.
The gig has been cancelled due to rain! Sorry to any who were planning on going. It will most likely be rescheduled and I’ll post an update when it is.
Opera and Hallowe’en
Haven’t been around here much lately, though I have been posting to the WordPress blog, coding like crazy, and generally keeping busy. However there are two recent events I wanted to highlight. The first was attending the opening night of Julius Caesar with the lovely Elissa. The performance was excellent, though longer than I am used to, and I would recommend it. I saw several people I know from school there, which doesn’t happen often, but they all seemed to disappear after intermission. Did we miss the party or something? We stayed in our nosebleed seats all night, but apparantly the thing to do is scope out empty seats during the first act and grab them after intermission. Noted.
The following night was the first official “party” I hosted at my new place, and it went well. Hallowe’en is my least favorite holiday, which isn’t to say I don’t like it, because it’s still a holiday, but as far as holidays go it’s the one I tend to enjoy the least. Anyway the party went well with food and candles and costumes and people I liked, and we ended up watching Ringu (the Japanese movie that inpsired The Ring), ordering pizza, and then by popular demand (with one dissenting vote) following it up with its American cousin, The Ring. Everyone had told me the Japanese version was supposed to be scarier and better, but I actually prefer the American version for a couple of reasons. Though things are less tidy, it’s more interesting and engaging. I hear a sequel is in the works. I didn’t dress up, but we did have one or two interesting ensembles.
Impartial Cache
Lately it is with less frequency that news from the White House sends a chill up my spine, yet it seems the White House is using technical means to prevent spidering and archival of key documents. This is, without question, highly questionable. I hope there is a good reason for this or that it will be reversed quickly, but one has to wonder whether such a deliberate action could have been done by someone who is not a stakeholder, like a web lackey.
Of course this is a situation that could be addressed by technical means. A spidering robot that did not follow the robot exclusion rules could spider a number of public government web pages at set intervals, say twice a day, archive the results of the crawl, and a summary of the differences between the versions could be offered as a service of government transparancy. WhiteHouse.gov would certainly be worth watching and others such as the Fed could be interesting as well. It’s not a trivial task, but I would imagine one of the groups interested in such things would have no problem funding the development and mantainance of such a tool. For complete transparancy the tool could be open source. I can’t think of a legitimate objection that could be brought against such a service by operators of the websites in question. Bandwidth use would be trivial compared to the amount of traffic such sites must get every day.
Two Great Shows
Radiohead was really exciting. The Chronicle has a review, but like most stories there it’s painful to read and I doubt that link will last as long as this entry is on my front page. Our seats were on the lawn and we were a bit to the left and back. We had a good clear view of the stage but couldn’t see too many details, though certainly everything came through. I would have liked te been closer to see how some of the effects were done, but maybe next time. They went through old and new songs, starting with some of the latest ones from Hail to the Thief and moving forward. There were a few flubs, such as Yorke skipping a section on 2 + 2 = 5 one or two other minor things that I doubt too many people noticed. My only complaint would be that with several songs they would end with a solo usually from the guitarist on the right (I can’t think of his name at the moment) but you could tell it was the end of the song and the energy was dying around him as he was trying to build up his solo. It would of been nice if they took a cue from jazz and went from a solo back into the melody or some sort of chorus to end the tune and keep the energy up.
The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at Jone’s Hall last night was one of those musical experiences that will stay indelibly burned in my memory for a long time. I had been looking for tickets and the day before my uncle called asking if I’d like to go with him, row B right in the center. Close enough to hear the musician’s sounds and not just the amplification, I was blown away. Every soloist and every piece was top-notch. The highlight of the evening, besides of course Houston native and HSPVA grad Andre Hayward’s music, was Eric Lewis’ piano. I have never heard of this man before, nor can I find anything on the web. Throughout the concert whenever Wynton introduced him he prefaced his name with what sounded like “Top Professor” which I’m sure means something, but I’m not sure what. Lewis’ solo on A Love Supreme’s Resolution was so intense and captivating that I was completely taken away by it in a way that music effects you only a few times in your life. The personnel of the group was different in several regards from the program, but that’s to be expected with the dynamics of a touring group and the fact that the programs are printed months before. If you have a chance to check out the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, do so. Highly recommended.
Ongoing
I usually write entries in my head before I put my fingers to the keyboard. The problem with this is that the longer I go between entries, the more that I try to cram into my mental post and inevitably the more that’s lost.
When you last left your Author he was gearing up for the second night of the Kemah Jazz Festival. It was fantastic, as expected, and he had good fun with the company. Tim Hagans made a guest appearance on Woody Witt’s set and it was the highlight of the night. Ended up leaving a little bit early due to tiredness, and slept well.
Saturday started with leftover pizza from Star Pizza, which, in hindsight, was most likely bad. Your Author was very, very hungry and ignored the fact that it tasted a little funny (it was vegetarian “gourmet” pizza anyway) and he was already on the way to rehearsal. By the end of the dress rehearsal with Steve Fulton things were queasy. But not too queasy to miss Kathy and Christine‘s birthday party that night, to which he was accompanied by Elissa. Too queasy to eat much there save a taste of really nice meat stick from Coffee “BBQ” Mike and a slice of cake, both of which were sorely regretted later.
Saturday night and Sunday morning were very harsh, and will not be discussed. Many thanks to my angel of a mother who helped smooth things over.
Sunday the Author was still sick, but knew he couldn’t miss the gig at Kemah, so went and played anyway. It went well, and many thanks to those such as Cody, Elissa, Greg, Sarah, and the others that attended. Food was still a bad idea though, and the trip had an early end. That night the fever came back strong and not much sleep was had.
Monday was a day of recovery. Tuesday was a return to normal affairs and catching up with things.
Which brings us to today. Things are very busy with many projects, but that’s par for the course. Tonight is the Radiohead concert which I’ve been looking forward to for months it seems. The weather is gorgeous. Can’t wait.
Kemah Jazz 2003
As I may have told some of you already, I’m performing in the Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival again this year. This year I’m performing with a different (and honestly much better) group than I did in previous years. So on Sunday from 2:10–3:00 I’ll be on the Kemah stage, jazzin’ it up. An interesting note about this performance is that I’m going to be making my public debut on flute. So if you can make it down come and say hi to me before or after the gig and we’ll chat.
If you’re interested in seeing some of the other performances as well this weekend probably the closest thing to a good schedule online is at JazzHouston. I have some pictures from last night’s performance forthcoming. All of the music was fantastic, and I really mean that. One of the non-music highlights of the night for me (besides the beautiful sky and good pizza) was Dennis Dotson saying my name from the stage as part of troubleshooting some amplicification problems. It’s the little things. 🙂
If you need any more information, feel free to contact me. Don’t be shy, no one else is: several days ago I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn’t recognize. I said hello and an unfamilar voice asked me if I had this year’s schedule for the festival. Apparently from a search engine she came across last year’s schedule and assumed I was the authority to contact, on my phone nonetheless, for this year’s. I directed her to a website or two that would have more current information than mine. It was certainly an interesting experience, but now I’m faced with problems of transparency. I want it to be as easy as possible for my readers to get in contact with me, except when I don’t. We’ll see how this works out. Of course it never would have been a problem in the first place if the festival had a decent website or the schedule available in a non-graphic form. What if a blind person wants to go and can only get to the schedule through the web? I guess they’re out of luck. The festival organizers are very open to suggestions though, and I’m sure if this issue is brought to their attention they’ll address it, it just probably hasn’t occurred to them.
Another Semester
It is with a slightly stuffy nose that I will start my third semester of college tomorrow. For the curious here is my schedule as it stands now, as much for my own reference as anyone elses.
- Monday
- Tuesday
- 10:00–11:30 — 3332: Philosophy of Language, Dr. Saka. AH 205.
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- 10:00–11:30 — 3332: Philosophy of Language. AH 205.
- Friday
As you can see it’s a little light, but that’s by design as I’d like to devote myself as much as possible to excelling in these courses, which by virtue of their instructors should be pleasantly challenging. Also playing in two or possibly three big bands, developing a new business, and moving WordPress forward, I knew that my extra-curricular commitments would be high and I didn’t want to over-commit myself (and possibly get ill again) like I did last semester.
No More Outlook Express
Microsoft abandons Outlook Express says ZDNet UK. I find this highly disappointing because I’ve really become attached to OE, mostly because of it’s enhanced IMAP functionality over Outlook 2003. However if you look at that bizarre out-of-context quote in the middle of the article,
“IMAP is just not a very rich protocol,” Steve Conn, Exchange Server product manager, told ZDNet Australia during the company’s Tech Ed conference. “The great majority of people used Outlook Express because they weren’t on a LAN environment, and Outlook was just too fat for them.”
It’s as out of place here as it is in the article. Basically though it sounds like they’re going to be focusing on Exchange functionality over IMAP. I’ve played around with Outlook 2003 and was very impressed but whether I use it or not is very dependent on how it works with IMAP, which I live on. I’ve been browsing the Evolution blog and the screenshots for the next version look really great, if reminiscent of Entourage. That would be fine for my desktop, and even my Mom’s desktop (I’m moving her over to Linux), but on my laptop which is tied to Windows by proprietary drivers and hardware, I’m still out of luck. Why is Microsoft abandoning the things that made them so prevalent on desktops? Hat tip: Leonard.
Truly Bizarre
Last Wednesday I transfered this domain to the new server, a dual Xeon with cute hard drives and RAM for days. This domain was, by far, the hardest one to transfer. I couldn’t tar it up because the previous system had a 2 gigabyte file size limit, and that mark was crossed long ago. What I ended up doing with the help of Mat is simply FTPing the albums directory (about 3 gigabytes) to the new server manually, and then packaging and transferring the rest of the account as I would normally. It was a hassle but it worked. Then another problem popped up, everyone seemed to be holding on the their outdated or cached DNS information like it was the last chocolate on earth, even though I had turned down the TTL days before. It was hairy for a few hours, but it all resolved itself, so to speak.
Except one. Mozilla 1.4 on this desktop still pulls up photomatt.net from the old server! Is it not simply a page cache, as I have cleared that and force reloaded more times than I can count. It is not a DNS issue, because Internet Explorer and Opera on the same machine seem to get to the new site just fine. I can ping, I can sing laments, I can fling books, but to no avail. So for the first times since I made the switch I am posting from IE instead of Mozilla, while I contemplate the best course of action from here. Perhaps another go at Firebird or the Mozilla 1.5 alpha is in order. That may solve it, but I’m still so confused as to why it is acting the way it does. Bizzare. Also if you don’t see this entry put your glasses on or, alternatively, contact me.
Elissa Is So…
Elissa made me a really cool mix CD, so cool I feel like I have to share the track list.
- Explosion — Dilute
- Paper Bag — Fiona Apple
- Kaini Industries — Boards of Canada
- Easy — Emiliana Torrini
- Why You’d Want to Live Here — Death Cab for Cutie
- Your Bleedin’ Heart — Reggie & the Full Effect
- In the Morning of the Magician… — The Flaming Lips
- Reunited — Funkstorung featuring Wu Tang
- Highschool Lover — AIR
- Is It Wicked Not to Care? — Belle & Sebastian
- Merge — Lamb
- You Got Me — Roots featuring Erykah Badu
- Labour of Love — Frente
- Playboys — Mono
- Felt Mountain — Goldfrapp
Collected Links
Sometimes these things just build up, here are a few links worth browsing.
- Thesis paper in Portuguese that includes some quotes from me and looks at photomatt.net
- Don’t Cell and Refuel
- Decent place to compare PDAs
- Bad PDA, cool watch Hat tip: Eli.
- I like Jane’s new (to me) look.
- Fly all over the US, virtually
- Neat bandwidth tester
- Make you desktop cool: ZMatrix and Drempels. Hat tip, Andy, Mat
- Will the real Hussain please stand up?. Hat tip: Iram, Mat.
- What does your name mean romantically?. Hat tip: Ramie, Elissa.
- Charleen has a cool new design Hat tip: Me ;).
- My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey); Pokemon Prove Evolutionism Is False. What to say? Hat tip: Ramie.
Hot Jazz Tonight
The word on the street is that tonight at 7:30 PM at the Pasta Co. on Woodway (map) there will be some burning big band jazz with yours truly and my good friend Rene in the alto section, and the lovely Sarah Williams screaming with the trumpets. Last week was a blast and this week should be even better. I need to get a list of all the amazing people in the band together, because everyone is so talented they deserve individual mention. Come check it out and say hi to me if you do.
Update: Thanks to Josh, Elissa, Jesse, Eddie, Emily’s parents Denise and Bob, my parents, my cousins Norma and Megan, Kelly Dean, and everyone else for coming out.
In The Last Episode…
A lot has happened since the last time I posted, it’s been a series of very long days.
Tuesday I went into work early to finish up some of the cabling (which is still going on) when mid-afternoon I got a call from John Greiner asking if I could play lead alto with a big band that night. He said they needed another alto too so of course I called Rene and we were all set for that night. I left work a little early to try and get a head start on traffic because I had to pick up my horn and stand from my house (Southwest), pick up Rene (Northeast), and go to the gig (Northwest). It was going to be a squeeze but Sarah offered to give Rene a ride and that made things so much easier.
The gig was a blast! It was the first ever performance of this group, which is basically a rehearsal band of musicians from around town. It had some funny parts (most of us were sight-reading) but it’s a great group and the good news is we’re going to be performing every Tuesday from 7:30–9:30 at the Pasta Co. on Woodway. Come check it out next week!
Yesterday was pretty crazy because the gateway/firewall/mail server here at work crashed pretty badly, to the point where I had spent so much time trying to fix bizarre problems that it became apparent that it would be faster just to set a new machine up. I was also surprised to find out that the machine was only a 166mhz Pentium with a mere 40mb of RAM! Before I saw the box itself I just assumed it was some sort of nice machine because it ran so well. Linux rocks! Anyway we set up a new one with some more modern hardware and I dropped Red Hat on it (something was wrong with our Slackware CDs) and then I spent the rest of the evening becoming intimately familiar with iptables. After that I drove all the way down to Sugarland to help some people out with some computer stuff and setting up a wireless network, and that went very well and it was a pleasant change of pace to have everything work the first time! Since it wasn’t enough having been working or driving for 16 hours that day, Josh called and we went to House of Pies, of course.
Today we’re getting three new T-1s installed!
Leaving (for) Las Vegas
At an ungodly hour Saturday morning I will be leaving hot Houston for very hot Las Vegas.
Why? Why does anyone go to Vegas? To play of course. I will be performing twice with a local union band for the American Federation of Musicians’ conference. I think the music is going to be pretty good so I’ll try to get a recording of it up on the site sometime (if I get one).
I’m looking forward to this a lot and I’m going to try not to get into too much trouble while I’m there. Wish me luck and if you’d like anything while I’m there get me an email quick.
I’m not sure if I’ll have any sort of internet access while I’m gone, so email responses may be even further delayed than normal. Updates probably won’t happen but I do plan to take a lot of pictures, so look for that when I get back. (Or when I find good WiFi.)
Speaking of pictures, Photo Matt.net has had its very first guest photographer, Elissa, whose photos are interspersed with photos from Tuesday (with Julie!). My plan is to eventually have them all in chronological order, but that’s proving to be quite a pain, so for now things are a little bouncy.
Gig @ Miller Outdoor
I just wanted to remind everyone that I’m going to be playing tonight at the Miller Outdoor Theatre at 6:30 PM. It’s a fun gig so come check it out.
Who Ya Going to Call?
From a trusted correspondent, talking with a contact who works at the Netscape part of AOL/Time Warner. “He said they had decided that weblogs are the next killer app, and that most of the work at the Mountain View office was going into building a weblog component for AOL. He also mentioned that about 400 people are working on that software. This is in constrast to about 20 who are working on Mozilla.” […] If there’s a problem doing this, please contact me, in confidence, if necessary.
Source. Three comments:
- I know Dave isn’t crazy about CSS and all that jazz, but could he at least use paragraph tags? Nothing by line breaks is so… never. Paragraphs have been around forever, no reason not to use them.
- 400 people working on it, assuming that even only 10% are actual developers (is this high?) I find it hard to believe that those 40 people will come upon a technical problem so insurmountable that only help from Dave, in confidence, if necessary, will help them.
- It also follows that if Microsoft and AOL/Netscape’s respective blogging tools or platforms don’t interoperate, I don’t think it will be because either lacks the technical skill to do so.
This is all pure speculation on my part, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m trying to think what kind of effect this could have on the blog world. There are already services out there such as Diaryland, Blogspot, Free Opendiary, Livejournal, Deadjournal, and Easyjournal that make the technical and financial barriers to something akin to blogging nonexistent. I know several people from my old school that might be hard pressed to send an email attachment but used one of the above tools with a degree of proficiency. What’s more these services, particularly OpenDiary and LiveJournal, tend to be very closed communities and don’t mingle much with blogs outside their service. So I think these new services in and of themselves will not be a big deal, however if they hook people on the concept and get them running for more advanced tools, then it could be significant. We’ll see.